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Friday, December 18, 2009

Sarah Palin on Sarah Palin's Climate Change Flip-Flop

Sarah Palin on Sarah Palin's Climate Change Flip-Flop and Her Refusal To Respond in Print to Dan E. Bloom's recent oped in the Juneau Empire outlining Alaska's future as a climate refugee loading dock full of polar cities for survivors of global warming's impact events in 2500 or so....

says Ravi Somiaya at Gawker.com

That Palin is a character! First she was totally for responding to climate change, for political expediency. Now she's totally against it, for political expediency. Textbook flip-flop? Of course not! Here's what Palin said about it on Facebook.

She was responding to Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post earlier this week. He pointed out, and we paraphrase wildly, that she is a giant hypocrite because she made statements accepting global warming while Governor of Alaska and is going against them in her new role as kind of pied piper for the mentally ill.

Here's what she said on Facebook yesterday:

I'd like to thank Eugene Robinson for highlighting Alaska's achievements on climate change ["Palin's own ‘Climate- gate,'" op-ed, Dec. 15] and for noting that I've "treated the issue as serious, complex, and worthy of urgent attention," while making "any number of pragmatic, reasonable, smart decisions as governor." But he's wrong to suggest that my views have somehow changed or that now I'll have to "renounce" my past efforts.

Once again: I don't deny that climate change is real. In creating a sub-cabinet to deal specifically with the issue, I said that "Alaska's climate change strategy must be built on sound science and the best available facts and must recognize Alaska's interest in economic growth and the development of its resources." That goal made sense to me then, and it makes sense to me now.

It sounds so plausible! You may even have been thinking; hold on, this is a reasonable position. But wait! All she's done is hedge her bets twice.

In an administrative order back when she was governor, in July, she outlined the pressing need to address climate change. And while she didn't overtly say it was man-made, the order seems to have been written to hint at that without saying so. Perhaps to allow precisely the mealy-mouthedness she's displaying now.

Alaska's climate is warming. While there have been warming and cooling trends before, climatologists tell us that the current rate of warming is unprecedented within the time of human civilization. Many experts predict that Alaska, along with our northern latitude neighbors, will warm at a faster pace than any other areas, and the warming will continue for decades.

She added that:

Climate change is not just an environmental issue. It is also a social, cultural, and economic issue important to all Alaskans.

And then there was this screeching, rubber-burning U-turn in the Washington Post, saying that leaked emails from about three scientists doing slightly off-kilter things meant that the whole field of climate science was flawed and that Obama should come back to 'merica and burn barrels of oil on the White House lawn like a real 'merican 'steada goofin' around in Copenhagen . (An op-ed by the way that perpetual-victim-conservatives claim publications like ours did not want run. This is false — we just wanted it not to be poorly contrived, tenuous and blatantly attention-grabbing.)

This, in Palin-world, is not a flip-flop. In other news, if that's true, Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em is the best musical work in history, a diet consisting of only Cheetos is healthy and Phil Spector is a good boyfriend.

Send an email to Ravi Somaiya, the author of this post, at ravi@gawker.com.